(NaturalNews) Following years of hard-hitting journalism highlighting the adulteration of hamburger meat with ammonia, McDonalds recently announced it had at last stopped doing so late last year.

Numerous activists including celebrity chef Oliver Stone, and health ranger Mike Adams had spoken out against the practice. By sanitizing discarded disease ridden meat with ammonium hydroxide (also used in glass cleaners, explosives and fertilizers) inedible meat can reenter the marketplace.

In Stone's own words "Basically we're taking a product that would be sold in the cheapest form for dogs and making it 'fit' for humans."

Due to the widespread unsanitary conditions within the meat industry, preventing severe bacterial contamination of meats is nearly impossible, especially for any discarded scraps. Food poisoning during bacterial outbreaks is the most visible symptom of this problem, and in turn the sole focus.

To quote Adams: "This is all fine with the USDA, which endorses the procedure as a way to make the hamburger beef "safe" enough to eat. Ammonia kills e.coli, you see, and the USDA doesn't seem to be concerned with the fact that people are eating ammonia in their hamburgers."

Ammonium Hydroxide's questionable safety

To address this conundrum, the USDA has classified ammonium hydroxide as "generally regarded as safe," meaning, like GMOs, its assumed lack of toxicity is not up for debate. A cursory Google search however shows otherwise, listing issues including permanent eye damage, carcinogenic properties and increasing the size of hormonally sensitive organs .

McDonalds however was quick to distance themselves from any negative PR prompting their decision, simply stating, "At the beginning of 2011, we made a decision to discontinue the use of ammonia-treated beef in our hamburgers. This product has been out of our supply chain since August of last year. This decision was a result of our efforts to align our global standards for how we source beef around the world."

These global standards do however include many other toxic additives

Investigators across the Atlantic in England found a wide range of other equally dubious additives still included in McDonalds food, identifying 78 from the most recent ingredient list McDonalds provides. Here are a few examples:

• MSG: An excitotoxin (labeled as yeast extract)

• Propylene Glycol: the less toxic version of ethylene glycol (antifreeze)

• Ammonium sulfate: similar to ammonium hydroxide, but used for dough consistency instead of meat decontamination.

• Sodium Benzoate: A preservative -- linked to a variety of ailments -- that becomes benzene, a highly toxic carcinogen when in the presence of heat or acid.

McDonalds choice to finally remove one additive, presumably on account of the bad publicity garnished from both its grotesque appearance and ability to conceal fecal matter contamination (the primary source of e-coli) in it's meat, is admirable. Yet, it is not the only factor to address and by no means a clean bill of health for these burgers. These other contaminants deserve just as much consumer attention and government regulation.

Worse still, the pink slime hasn't gone away either. As the USDA considers ammonium hydroxide a component in a production procedure, it is not a listed ingredient, and there is no way to easily discern if processed meat contains it. This may partially account for its widespread presence in other discount markets including school lunches. Even with this chemical "protection," salmonella and e-coli incidents have repeatedly occurred in ammonia treated junk meat.